Three Years After Terror Attacks, Public Still Doubts ‘Official’ Story

By
Christopher Bollyn

SOMERSET COUNTY, Pennsylvania—Three years after
the events of 9-11, half of the residents of New York City believe U.S. leaders
had foreknowledge and “consciously failed” to act to prevent the disasters,
while two in three want a new investigation of the “still-unanswered
questions.”

In the first survey of public opinion about
allegations of U.S. government complicity and whitewashing of the events of
9-11, a Zogby International poll found that fewer than two in five New Yorkers
believe the official 9-11 commission “answered all of the important questions
about what actually happened on Sept. 11.”

One in two New York City residents say that senior
government officials “knew in advance that attacks were planned on or around
Sept. 11, 2001, and that they consciously failed to act,” according to the poll
of Aug. 24-26, 2004.

Sixty-six percent called for another full
investigation, by Congress or Elliot Spitzer (left), New York’s attorney
general, to resolve the “unanswered questions.”

“I think these numbers show that most New Yorkers
are now fed up with the silence, and that politicians trying to exploit 9-11 do
so at their peril,” said W. David Kubiak, executive director of 911truth.org,
one of the groups that commissioned the poll. “The 9-11 case is not closed, and
New York’s questions are not going away.”

The New York Times, on the other hand, told puzzled readers on Sept. 11,
2004, that it’s possible to know what happened on 9-11 “without knowing what
happened.”

“In the three years since 9-11, we’ve begun to
understand that it’s possible to know what happened without knowing what
happened,” the editorial began. “Some of what we need to know publicly has been
provided by the report of the 9-11 commission. Other answers are lacking.”

Sept. 11 is “a central event in this nation’s
history,” the Times editorial concluded. “It’s important that we who
live most immediately in its shadow press hard to learn everything that can be
learned about that day and to make sure that nothing is allowed to fade into
the world of the publicly unknowable.”

The New York Times efforts, however, did not include sending a reporter to
either of the two recent 9-11 conferences held on Broadway in downtown
Manhattan that addressed the unanswered questions.

The first event, “The 9-11 Citizens Commission:
The Omissions Hearings,” was held Sept. 9 at Symphony Space on Broadway. This
six-hour conference was chaired by former Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D-Ga.) and
brought together panels of experts who presented new evidence and raised
questions about the official version of what happened.

The second event, “Confronting the Evidence: 9-11
and the Search for Truth,” was held at the Manhattan Center Ballroom during the
evening of Sept. 11.

While American Free Press participated in
both conferences, The New York Times, which says it should “press hard
to learn everything that can be learned about that day,” confirmed it had not
covered either event.

While the Times carried a 9-11 story daily
during the days leading up to the third anniversary, its reporting failed to
ask critical questions. For example, in a Sept. 10 article entitled “Falling
Bodies,” the fate of more than 1,000 people trapped in the twin towers above
the levels impacted by the planes is discussed without mentioning the
possibility of rescue by helicopter—or the fact that the doors to the roof had
been locked.

A CITIZEN’S EFFORTS

Both Manhattan events were sponsored by a
remarkable and well-heeled citizen named Jimmy Walter, who has dedicated
one-tenth of his net worth to bring attention to the yet-unanswered questions
of 9-11.

To bring these issues to a wider audience, Walter
is purchasing full-page ads in mainstream magazines and newspapers raising key
points and promoting books such as Painful Questions by Eric Hufschmid.

Walter told AFP he is spending $250,000 to bring
public attention to the official cover-up of 9-11. Walter said he had only
realized that something was seriously wrong with the government’s version of
events after having seen Hufschmid’s book and videos, which was like “an
epiphany.”

Before that “epiphany,” Walter said he had
believed that 9-11 had been “a sin of omission, not commission.”

“I believe explosives [were] used,” Walter said
about the destruction of the twin towers. Told that the Anti-Defamation League
attacked this writer for an article about eyewitness evidence of explosions in
the towers immediately after 9-11, Walter said: “The Mossad is in it up to
their necks.”

Walter, 57, described himself as a “Bush clone.”
The son of a millionaire, Walter graduated cum laude from a prestigious
prep school and then obtained an undergraduate degree from the University of
North Carolina.

Like Bush, Walter said he served in the Air
National Guard in Florida and found the regulation that allowed him to skip out
the last two years. After bouts of drug use and alcohol abuse, Walter said he
“found the truth.”

“I want to do something significant,” Walter said.
And bringing public attention to the unanswered questions about 9-11 is the
best way to do that, he said. Walter recently purchased full-page ads in Reader’s
Digest, Business Week, New Yorker and Inc.

When 9-11 “activist” and conference “advisor”
Nicolas Levis hysterically tried to steer the second conference away from
discussion of the evidence, security guards removed him from the theater.

This writer was then asked to join the second
panel, which discussed the physical evidence, with author Webster G. Tarpley
and engineer Jeff King.

Both Tarpley and King agree that the towers were
demolished in a crime that employed both conventional and exotic technologies.

FLIGHT 93

American Free Press visited Somerset County to look into some of the questions
surrounding United Airlines Flight 93, which allegedly turned over and crashed
in a refilled strip mine between Lambertsville and Shanksville, Pa., taking 44
lives with it.

Many local residents believe the plane was shot
down, which they say would explain why parts of the plane and its contents were
found strewn over a large area.

One question, “is what happened to the physical
wreckage of the plane?”

“There was no plane,” Ernie Stull, mayor of
Shanksville, told German television in March 2003:

“My sister and a good friend of mine were the
first ones there,” Stull said. “They were standing on a street corner in
Shanksville talking. Their car was nearby, so they were the first here—and the
fire department came. Everyone was puzzled, because the call had been that a
plane had crashed. But there was no plane.”

“They had been sent here because of a crash, but
there was no plane?” the reporter asked.

“No. Nothing. Only this hole.”

When AFP asked Stull about his comments, he disagreed
about when he had gone to the crash site. “A day or two later,” Stull said, was
about when he went to the site. But he reiterated the fact that they saw little
evidence of a plane crash.

Nena Lensbouer, who had prepared lunch for the
workers at the scrap yard overlooking the crash site, was the first person to
go up to the smoking crater.

Lensbouer told AFP that the hole was five to six
feet deep and smaller than the 24-foot trailer in her front yard. She described
hearing “an explosion, like an atomic bomb”—not a crash.

Lensbouer called 911 and stayed on the line as she
ran across the reclaimed land of the former strip mine to within 15 feet of the
smoking crater.

Lensbouer told AFP that she did not see any
evidence of a plane then or at any time during the excavation at the site, an
effort that reportedly recovered 95 percent of the plane and 10 percent of the
human remains.

While specific details vary, the explanation for
the disappearance of the plane is that the reclaimed land acted like liquid and
absorbed the aircraft, which is said to have impacted at between 450 and 600
miles per hour.

This explanation is also used to explain why there
was only a brief explosion with one short-lived smoke cloud, not unlike a bomb
blast.

“I never saw that smoke,” Paula Long, an
eyewitness, told AFP. Long ran “immediately” after hearing the crash but did
not see the cloud of smoke caught in the now-famous photograph by Valencia
McClatchey, she said.

“It [the ground] liquefied,” Bob Leverknight, an
active member of the Air National Guard and correspondent with Somerset’s Daily
American, told AFP regarding how the wreck and much of the fuel
disappeared. One of the massive engines, Leverknight said, however, bounced off
the ground and was found in the woods.

Jim Svonavec, whose company worked at the site and
provided excavation equipment, told AFP that the recovery of the engine “at
least 1,800 feet into the woods,” was done solely by FBI agents using his
equipment.